about any other place. He was obliged to see that Isabel was sometimes cross and overbearing to her mother, but he thought the less of it because she was always sunny and considerate to him. Several times he could not help noticing that her sense of honor (a virtue the possession of which is difficult to simulate) was not up to his own high standard. This was hard on Isabel, for, as regarded her sense of honor, by judicious inflation she had managed to make something perilously like nothing assume really respectable proportions; and for Arthur to notice that it was wavering, and did not seem to be very solid, merely showed that he was hard to satisfy. He perceived more than once that she was talking to produce a certain effect, and not because she really believed the things she said. She saw that he noticed this, but she could not always guard against it. It is hard to pretend to be truthful when you are not, because the essence of truth is that you are not pretending.

Isabel knew a great deal better than I do how Arthur ought to be managed, but if I might presume to criticise one little point, I should suggest that she need not have given herself so much trouble to seem better than she was. The gist of the matter was right here: Arthur came to see her because she was sympathetic, affectionate, fascinating, and pretty; and if he came to see her enough, he would marry her. He did not come to see her because she had a high sense of honor or a great regard for truth. Unfortunately, those qualities do not draw well. In a wife they are of inestimably more importance than fascination or beauty; but no one ever went to call on a girl because she did not tell lies.

When it came to the point, everything went quietly enough. Arthur and Isabel were in the parlor together; Isabel standing in the oriel window looking at the sunset, while Arthur looked at her. Suddenly it came over him that he would give anything in the world for the right to hold that girl in his arms and kiss that cheek which would have tempted a saint. He rose to his feet. "Isabel!"

he said.

When she turned and their eyes met, she knew that the battle was won.

What's the matter, reader? There you are again, banging my poor story against the table! What do you mean by calling Arthur a fool and an egregious

ass

? I'd let you know that my hero was neither! He was a man who, having done a foolish thing, was suddenly brought back to the point he started from, and, having another opportunity, did it again. Most of us would. We don't get much wiser as we get older. Arthur Sands was a good man and a sensible one. He had one weak point: he was peculiarly sensitive to the charm of an attractive and beautiful woman. Carried away by his feelings, he married a foolish, heartless girl, and spent three unhappy years with her. When it was all over, and he had another chance given him, he was carried away by his feelings again, and this time married a girl a little less foolish and a little more heartless than the other. But she was fascinating, there was no doubt about that. It was all perfectly natural. Unwise he was, perhaps, but who is not unwise in that way? Do you think you would have escaped, reader, or would have wanted to escape, if Isabel had really undertaken to marry you?

Robert Beverly Hale.

see how thorough and successful my preparation has been." I told him that he reminded me of the great Abernethy, who, early in the century, had stood at the head of the medical profession in England. In one of his works he had laid it down as an invariable rule that no more than eight ounces of animal food should be taken in a single day. From time to time he would give a dinner to the most promising of his hospital students. "Now, my lads," he used to say, as they sat down to a well-spread table, "hang the eight-ounce rule;" and they did suspend it for that night, at least. I went on to say that I always wished, at these Greenwich dinners, that every guest were provided with the placard which in certain towns I had seen hung outside the omnibuses when there was room for no more passengers, "Full inside." Furnished with it, a man, when he had had enough, could enjoy a quiet talk with those sitting near him without being worried at every moment by the waiter thrusting dishes and bottles of wine over his shoulder.

later years.

A Unitarian, I believe, he remained till the end of his life. Like Lord Chancellor Eldon, he was a buttress rather than a pillar of the Church, for he was never seen inside. His were the palmy days of the Saturday Review. He was supported by a large and strong staff of reviewers. Matthew Arnold once said to me that it was easy to see that every subject was entrusted to a writer who was master of it. Among the contributors were E. A. Freeman and J. R. Green, the historians, Sir Henry Maine and Lord Justice Bowen, Sir James Stephen and his brother Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Professor Owen. It was in the Saturday Review that Mr. Freeman and some of the younger writers of his school so often exposed the blunders into which Mr. Froude was always falling. In this exposure, Mr. Green, I have little doubt, often bore his part. I was told that when he was still a young writer, unhappily he did not live to be an old one, at an evening party, the lady of the house brought him up to introduce him to Mr. Froude. The great man looked coldly at him for a moment, and then exclaimed, "Saturday Reviewer! Don't want to know him." It is a pity that Mr. Froude could not have laid to heart the lessons that were taught him by his reviewers, however bitter was the language in which they were imparted. Of strict accuracy he seemed incapable by nature; just as Johnson's friend, Bennet Langton, "had no turn to economy," so Mr. Froude had no turn to truthfulness. Where nature had fallen short, inclination and study did little to remedy the deficiency. He was not, perhaps, aware of his failings. I once sent him a few notes about some errors in his Life of Carlyle. He replied, "The utmost care will not prevent mistakes. Printers blunder when no blunders could be anticipated, and the eye passes over them unconsciously." In this defense of himself against the suspicion of carelessness he was so careless as to send his letter unsigned.

At one of these Saturday Review dinners, the cook had forgotten to bring up the rear of the long line of dainties with those boiled beans and bacon in which 'the man of oaths took special delight. This happened before I had begun to write for the paper, so that I did not witness the strange scene which followed. The landlord was sent for, and on him was opened a battery of the strongest and most original profanity, worthy of the rage of a man who, having dined on turtle-soup, fish of a dozen varieties, fowl, flesh, and venison, felt that, without beans and bacon, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. The memory of such a man should surely be honored in Boston.

Scarcely less strange a pillar of the Anglican Church was my kind friend the second editor. In his early manhood he had filled the pulpit in the Unitarian chapel in London in which Mr. Moncure Conway so long officiated in

My friend the editor, from whom I have been led away by this digression, however severe was the formidable Review which he so ably conducted, was himself the most kindly and gentle of men. He was rarely to be seen anywhere but in his office and his home. He never went to a club, and he never dined out except on a Saturday when the week's work was done. His daughter, under the name of Ross Niel, had published a few volumes of poetical plays, written with great taste and spirit. His one relief from work was music. Every evening he played on the violoncello, while she accompanied him on the piano. However late his task was finished, and every Thursday night it went on to the small hours of the morning, he soothed his tired nerves by this little concert. How the nerves of the authors were soothed, who were often so mercilessly criticised, is matter for conjecture.

He once sent me for review the longest modern novel I have ever seen. It could scarcely have fallen short of Richardson's Clarissa. It was so long that some of the volumes I made no pretense of reading. I did not even cut their leaves. To my surprise, my article was not inserted, though I received for it the usual payment. The author an old soldier had just had a play brought out at one of the London theatres, and had received some compliments in the Saturday Review. He wrote so grateful a letter of acknowledgment that my friend owned to me that he had not the heart to ridicule his foolish novel, and so had committed my article to the wastepaper basket.

One day he told me of a vexatious blunder into which he had fallen. I had sent him an article on school histories, in which I maintained that Goldsmith's History of Greece with all its errors, written as it was by a man of genius, was a far better book for young people than Dr. Smith's History with all its ac

curacy and all its dullness. Dr. Smith was a big man in the literary world of London, not by his schoolbooks, though they brought him in many thousands of pounds every year, but as the editor of the Quarterly Review, that famous Review which, years earlier, was thought to have "snuffed out" poor Keats's soul. He had long wished to know my friend, and had asked a common acquaintance to let them meet at his dinner-table. The dinner was fixed for a certain Saturday. On the morning of that very day appeared my article. It had been in type for some weeks. That it contained an attack on Dr. Smith's History had altogether escaped my friend's memory. The awkward blunder which he had made he discovered an hour or two before the dinner-party. It was with a heavy heart that he went to meet this brother editor. It was impossible to allude to the article, and explain his entire innocence of any wish to give offense. He felt sure it would be believed that it was a premeditated slight. The meeting was a cool one. Dr. Smith, he told me with a smile, never expressed the slightest wish to see him again.

My friend had also an amusing story to tell of the editor of the Westminster Review, one Mr. H- -, a successor, though not the immediate successor, of John Stuart Mill in that post. Mr. H-published a book on theology, in which he supported his views by citations from the Greek fathers. Of Greek, however, he knew next to nothing, and so he sought the aid of a learned friend in his translations of these passages. Unfortunately, it too frequently happened that learning and his theological theories were at variance. In those cases it was learning that had to yield. The fathers were made to say, not what they had said, but what they ought to have said, and what undoubtedly they would have said had each of them been a Mr. H. He begged my friend, who was at this time assistant editor of the Sat

urday Review, and whom he had long known, to get his book noticed in that journal. All he asked for was a review, -whether favorable or unfavorable he cared not a jot. The work was accordingly sent to a learned critic, who, without any pity, mercilessly exposed the writer's monstrous blunders. So severe was the criticism that the assistant editor did all he could to keep it from appearing. Just as, in the Reign of Terror, a friendly clerk in the office of the Committee of Public Safety often saved a man's life by keeping the paper containing his case at the bottom of the pile, so the assistant editor for many weeks kept this review at the bottom of the pile of articles that were awaiting insertion. The only result was a succession of bitter reproaches from the author for his indifference to an old friend, who asked for nothing but a review, and cared not whether it was friendly or hostile. At last the review was printed. Mr. Hat once quarreled with his old friend, and never spoke to him again.

It was not till about the year 1869 that I became a contributor to the Saturday Review; but when I had once begun to write there were few numbers for some years in which I had not an article. The editor discovered in me a certain vein of humor, and for the most part sent me books to review which deserved little more than ridicule. What havoc I made among the novelists and the minor poets! I amused my readers because I was first amused myself by the absurdities which I everywhere found in these writers, and by the odd fancies which rose in my mind as I read their works. At last, however, my humor began to fail. It was over the minor poets that I first became dejected. Even in their tragedies I no longer found anything amusing. I entreated my friendly editor to hand them over to a fresher hand. With the novelists I struggled on for some while; but finally even they could no longer raise a natural laugh. My mirth was becoming VOL. LXXVI. - NO. 453.

4

forced, and I let them follow the poets. Now and then, it is true, I lighted upon a pretty story. I recall with pleasure Mrs. Parr's Dorothy Fox and Mrs. Walford's Mr. Smith. Whenever I met modest worth, I hope I always did it justice.

One result of all this novel-reading was a total incapacity, lasting for many years, of reading any novels except those which were the favorites of my younger days. To read a novel became so inseparably connected, in my mind, with three pounds ten shillings (about seventeen dollars), the usual payment for a Saturday Review article, that without the one I could not undertake the other. All in vain have friends urged me to read the works of Black, Blackmore, Hardy, Howells, Henry James, Stevenson, and Kipling. Not a single story of any one of these writers have I ever read, or am I likely ever to read. Perhaps, however, I should be less confident on this matter, for I have just been induced to listen to Miss Jewett's A Marsh Island. It pleased me so much that I see it is possible that stories may solace the hours of my old age, as it draws on, as they charmed those of my youth.

Among my autographs there are not a few letters from those who had suffered from my reviews. They were forwarded to me by the editor; for my name was not known, as the contributions were anonymous. An enraged poetess warned me that the day would come when women would have their rights. Then the dastardly man who insolently compared the flights of a swan to the waddlings of the domestic duck would have to meet her whom he had thus wronged, face to face, pistol in hand. She was far fiercer than a brother poet who had insisted on being reviewed. "When I read my own poems," he wrote to the editor, "and remember that they are written by a man not yet twenty-one, I am astounded at my own genius. Other men would say ability; but genius I say, and genius I